MANCHESTER CITY’S 6-1 trouncing of United at Old Trafford yesterday was, in statistical terms at least, a result of genuinely historic significance.
The champions’ heaviest home league defeat in 56 years, Sunday will likely be remembered as the day the city’s perennial underdogs validated their claim to on-field parity and, in doing so, exacted a costly humiliation on their tormentor-in-chief for the past two decades, Sir Alex Ferguson.
The United manager later described the result as “an incredible disappointment” and “[United's] worst ever day”.
By contrast, City’s faithful streamed from the stadium on a cloud of jubilant disbelief. Decades of marginalisation, underachievement and disappointment had been lifted in a single display of ruthlessness and precision. For them, it yielded the most elusive of gifts: catharsis.
But what were they celebrating, exactly, and to what extent can the City team that took to the field on Sunday really claim continuity with the teams of club’s less illustrious past?
Since the Abu Dhabi Group, headed by Sheik Mansour Bin Zayad Al Nayhan, assumed control of the club in 2008, City have spent more than £400 million on talent. Aside from Joe Hart and Micah Richards, not a single member of the club’s starting eleven can trace their signing to the era of the club’s previous owner, Thai businessman and politician Thaksin Chinawatra.
City’s success is a function of brute financial will, the capacity of money to provoke nearly instantaneous change in a largely unregulated industry. From the perspective of City’s supporters, victory isn’t just hollow, it’s arbitrary.
Those fans in blue who paraded in front of Sky Sports’ cameras yesterday to declare their collective relief, hail their perseverance and announce City’s “arrival” to the world may believe they share a common bond with supporters of, say, the club’s 1976 League Cup-winning side, but the fellowship is an illusory one.
To cheer the stellar performances of Silva, Balotelli and Dzeko isn’t to place one’s faith in the triumph of something regional, something quintessentially Eastlands, it’s to cheer unwittingly the factors that made the institution a sound prospect for unprecedented levels of investment: the population of its catchment area, the possibility of on-site planning permission and well-developed local infrastructure.
Of course, City aren’t the first Premier League club to reap the rewards of colossal deficit spending– Chelsea FC remains hostage to the whims of one Roman Abramovich– but the magnitude and vulgarity of the club’s investment, its circumvention of etiquette and disregard of subtlety, stretch the established dynamic to the point of parody.
That said, it would be foolish to cast City as the Premier League’s villains.
The principles guiding the club’s ascent of the table are the same ones to which the entire league, indeed the continent as a whole, have long been in thrall. Mansour may have perfected the template by taking its elements to ludicrous, bank-breaking extremes, but the rise of the Blue Moon is as much a tale of institutional complacency as it is the vision of one predatory capitalist.
UEFA is poised to implement its Fair Play regulations, but aside from futher separating teams that contest the Champions League on a habitual basis and their other, less fortunate market competitors, what possible effect can they have?
Even if the regulations prove a successful deterrent to deficit spending, Europe will be left with a footballing hierarchy effectively frozen in time, forever polarised between the one-time haves and have nots.
Read in the context of a dour present and increasingly predictable future, maybe the desire of certain foreign owners to introduce a cooperative, franchise-based system similar to that employed by the NFL and MLB isn’t quite as opposed to the interests of fans as it would immediately appear.
